A scene in 'Infinite Jest' is reborn as a rock video

Sunday

Aug 28, 2011 at 12:01 AMAug 28, 2011 at 2:41 PM

LOS ANGELES - Although many details in the life of Michael Schur convey his obsession with the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest, perhaps the most salient is that his wife once forbade him from discussing the 1,079-page work of fiction at social gatherings.

LOS ANGELES — Although many details in the life of Michael Schur convey his obsession with the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest, perhaps the most salient is that his wife once forbade him from discussing the 1,079-page work of fiction at social gatherings.

His fixation never subsided, and Schur — the co-creator and show runner of the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation — has recently been re-immersing himself in Wallace’s 1996 opus about a near future of alienation, drug rehabilitation and calendar years sponsored by corporations.

His literary mania has been put to productive use in a new music video that Schur directed for the Decemberists, the Portland, Ore., rock band, set to the track Calamity Song.

It is a project that so fully combines Schur’s favorite book — the first he read that he felt was written the way he thought and spoke — and favorite band, he says he would have been crushed if anyone else had gotten the assignment.

“If Scorsese had directed it,” he said, “I would have been like ‘Why does he get that gig?’

The video, which made its online debut on Monday, depicts the playing of Eschaton, a game invented by Wallace that he describes about 325 pages into Infinite Jest.

Adolescents from a New England tennis academy are seen ritualistically serving balls on a court onto which a map of the world has been superimposed. The balls, which represent 5-megaton nuclear warheads, are aimed at objects labeled as military targets — power plants, missile installations — while a lone child oversees the game from a nearby computer terminal.

All in all, it isn’t exactly Battleship. Wallace wrote that the athletic skills required by Eschaton separated it “from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables.”

Colin Meloy, the Decemberists’ frontman, said he wasn’t thinking specifically of Infinite Jest when he wrote the brightly apocalyptic Calamity Song for the band’s recent album, The King Is Dead, although a lyric about “the year of the chewable Ambien tab” is a nod to the book.

Meloy, who finished reading Infinite Jest two summers ago after a few failed attempts, was drawn to the Eschaton sequence as he thought of a video concept.

Yet when he pitched the idea to his management, executives at Capitol Records and prospective directors, Meloy said, “A lot of people were like ‘I have no idea how you could possibly turn this into a music video.’ ”

Enter Schur, 35, who had never directed a music video before but who attended Harvard with the brother of Meloy’s band’s manager and had more than a little familiarity with the author (who hanged himself three years ago at 46).